A giant of the community broadband movement passed away a few weeks ago of a heart attack at his home in Texas.
Gene was a dear friend and I am now very glad that I was able to have dinner with him this past April at the Broadband Communities conference in Austin.
The article provides a summary of Gene's influence and his accomplishments better than I ever could. I met Gene in the nineties at one of the Association for Community Networking meetings. We became fast friends and I spent many days in Texas working with Gene over the years. Gene's passing is a reminder of the other giants of community networking we have lost, including Steve Snow and Steve Cisler.
Today, more than ever, the original goals of community networking remain fresh and largely unfulfilled. With the rapid commercialization of the Internet in the late nineties and early 2000s, most community network projects closed their doors, and the industry viewed the whole effort as largely unimportant.
But the hegemony of Facebook, Google, and the many other commercial enterprises that have largely ignored privacy considerations and created information service monopolies, independent, privacy-protecting community-focused services are critical to preserving our privacy and our freedom.